Lisette quitté la plaine c.1757-2025
We have folk songs that carry earlier memories, but Lisette quitté la plaine remains the oldest printed song in Haitian Creole. Like its melodic source, Que ne suis-je la fougère, it has defied genre, crossed borders, and resisted a single meaning for nearly three centuries. It first appears in the archival record as a contrafactum in the plains outside Port-au-Prince before taking over colonial Saint-Domingue. Lisette’s Haitian Creole text replaces the languishing shepherds of the French pastorale with the plight of enslaved Black lovers. It exposes the sharp contradiction between the refined colonial salon in which it thrived and the brutal, extractive system of slavery that sustained elite culture. Why perform such a work, let alone celebrate it?
The Lisette Project interrogates the sources that first recorded Lisette's generally accepted history. We complicate its narrative by acknowledging the colonial practice of both adapting original Black oral culture and failing to credit those sources. This leaves room for Black and interracial communities that may also have sung this song.
This project traces Lisette from Saint-Domingue to France, where it may have sparked abolitionist reflections in a dying Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then ended up in one of the most reprinted French song anthologies in history. We also follow Lisette to the United States alongside thousands of people fleeing the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). There, even anti-abolitionist writers like Moreau de Saint-Méry used it to demonstrate the expressive force of early Haitian Creole to white readers, even as inter-racial communities preserved a version that became the Louisiana folk song, Zélim to quitté la plaine. In the mid twentieth century, Camille Nickerson, a Black musician and cultural mediator, reshaped Zélim into the art song Lisette ma chère amie (1942). She and other concert musicians carried this tune from Southern homes onto recital stages across the United States in celebration of Creole heritage.
The Lisette of American-occupied 20th Port-au-Prince calls us back to modern Haiti. There, reactionary intellectuals Jean Price Mars and Ludovic Lamothe upcycled what they knew as a colonial relic from the archives of Moreau de Saint-Méry into a nationalist meringue de salon, Lisette (1927). This new setting, published in Mars’ seminal manifesto advocating for Haiti’s Black roots, celebrated nearly 200 years of Black expressive culture in the Haitian Creole language.
I began the Lisette Project in 2021 with the conviction that these songs preserve a difficult history that still asks something of us. This project does not celebrate the colonial world that first produced Lisette. It corrects the colonial record and follows the long and circuitous journey of Haiti’s oldest published folk song.